


just a cage of rib bones and other various parts

by hypotheticalfanfic



Series: rogue one collex [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-12
Updated: 2017-05-12
Packaged: 2018-10-31 00:21:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10887990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypotheticalfanfic/pseuds/hypotheticalfanfic
Summary: A man watches his death come for him. Saw Gerrera, one last time.





	just a cage of rib bones and other various parts

This is how it ends.

The idea of running away, jumping over collapsing floors and leaping into a shuttle? Laughable.

Hells, just walking without pain, without fear of falling? Ludicrous.

Once upon a time, he knows he must have been young. Must have had lungs and feet and a heart that worked. Logic dictated it. He couldn’t have been born with this rig on. He can, if he tries very hard, remember what it felt like to run. He had been good at it, he thinks. Had won prizes in his youth, even. There had been serious talk of learning a sport, going to one of the central worlds to perform. His sister—

He won’t go there just now. Won’t prod that empty space. No good can come of it. Not just yet. A man has a moment, still, before his death reaches him. Plenty of time.

The wind rushes into his face. It doesn’t hurt, not really, not right now. The dust is light, the heat isn’t stifling, it’s still just wind. This will be a good death. A man can see this coming. It will not take him by surprise in the night. He will not be put down like an ailing pet. A man will die standing, facing forward, eyes open. There are worse deaths than this.

There is a death like his sister’s. There are deaths like innumerable friends’, on and off the field of battle. There is a death like the one he knows is happening to Bor Gullet somewhere back behind him. Bor Gullet had not fled with the others. Bor Gullet was not well liked, was no one’s friend. A man had to often step in and protect Bor Gullet from a knife or a kick. His troops knew full well what Bor Gullet could do to them, and knew, too, that Bor Gullet had no bones, that a slime and skin sac was all that kept Bor Gullet breathing. The temptation was too much for them, every once in a while, and a man understood. Did not hold it against them. Sometimes Saw sat in the small dark room (so like a cage) with Bor Gullet, talked aloud, idly, of nothing in particular. Bor Gullet hadn’t seen into Saw’s mind, and Saw thought perhaps if he ever had—

Bor Gullet did not answer, but that was the point, a man could suppose.

Jyn had always answered. A man couldn’t talk aloud, couldn’t voice his inner thoughts, without her dancing voice threading through. A man couldn’t stand on his chassis and declaim on the theme of oppression without Jyn asking how to spell “collusion” or what a “quisling” was. A man sometimes regretted, for one small moment, letting her sprawl out in the room while he talked himself hoarse. The rusty-hinge sound his voice made now wasn’t always there. He knew, obviously, that it was injury and damage, not talking, that’d roughened his voice so. But a man did like to talk, even before the rebellion began. A man had always liked to talk, to his sister or a tree or the very air.

The talking helped, though. At that time, in that place, the talking had helped. With the nightmares. The paranoia. Like lancing a boil, like cleaning a wound: let the poison out into the air where it could dissipate, couldn’t nestle in the folds of him and fester. He worried it would infect others, her, but it didn’t seem to. The fighters with him were already part of it, and while Jyn learned anything anyone taught her, she never internalized anything the way a man might expect. She was made of something other than the fire and metal that twisted his own bones. He envied that, and pitied it too.

It had been Lyra, not Galen, who’d made it all happen. Lyra whose clever eyes and hands had made him laugh more often than they’d amused Galen. A man could have fallen in love with Lyra in half a heartbeat, if a man had been in possession of a real heart anymore. He figured, though, that Galen had never stood a chance. When he’d brought them to the farm planet, to hide, he’d taken some solace in the ease on Lyra’s face. She was afraid, of course, not stupid, but in the green and brown, the damp, she looked so much closer to being at home. She’d smiled at him, and he’d smiled back, and then Galen had cleared his throat and asked about facilities.

Not that he hadn’t liked Galen, too, well enough. When a man could push back the seething hiss of _collaborator_ , when he could allow himself to be deceived by Galen’s talk, his promise of ignorance. It was, as an old friend would have said, bantha gas, but it was more than some would do. As time went on, though, he’d grown angrier. A man lost patience with collaborators, with one small step of progress, with the slow path. Besides, there was Jyn to consider. He couldn’t see her grow up under that flag. They didn’t have time, not anymore, to work slow and steady and careful and quiet. The fuse was shortening.

When his sister died, something sparked, and as a man woke each morning to a world empty of the person he loved most in it, the wind fanned the spark. A man grew cold and angry, short-sighted even. A man took risks and paid prices he didn’t need to, a man wept, a man watched himself wither and change. Sometimes little Jyn made him angry, she looked so much like his sister. So much like her mother. So little of her father in her. He cringed every time she leapt off something she shouldn’t have been on in the first place, could see clear as kyber the way her bones would break. Fragile.

She never fell. Little Jyn flew, just needed a pair of wings and she’d never touch the ground again.

He should have known.

The death that’s coming is a good one, he can exit on this note and be content. No more hobbling away. Stand tall and true, breathe, find your center. He knows enough of the Force to know it won’t take him for a ghost, but if there is a world or a life beyond this, maybe his sister is there. The dust hurts now, pings his face, his eyes. “Steela,” he says, the rasp in his voice wrapping around her name. An embrace, one last time. If the Force ever loved him even a little, maybe she’ll be waiting on the other side.

A man closes his eyes. A man takes one painful rasp of a breath. A man steps forward beyond what is known. A man dies.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Ingrid Michaelson's "Breakable"


End file.
